Lata Mani

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

"An important and disturbing book. Lata Mani has reopened the archives on widow burning in colonial India. Her meticulous reading of contemporary texts . . . is exemplary for its conceptual sophistication. Unsettling and illuminating, this is feminist scholarship at its best."—Ranajit Guha, founding editor Subaltern Studies "Mani's argument that the terms 'tradition' and 'modernity' are inscribed and reinscribed in the bodies of colonized women has forever changed our understandings of patriarchy, nationalism, and colonialism, and indeed redefined the conditions for 'knowing' with respect to these contexts."—Lisa Lowe, author of Immigration Acts "Lata Mani's brilliant and persuasive analysis of official, native and missionary writings on sati in colonial India makes for a new beginning in contemporary analysis of colonial discourse.This is the book that many have waited for. A landmark publication in several fields at once: modern South Asian history, feminist critiques of colonial discourse, and cultural studies."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago

The Debate on Sati in Colonial India

Contentious Traditions

"An important and disturbing book. Lata Mani has reopened the archives on widow burning in colonial India. Her meticulous reading of contemporary texts . . . is exemplary for its conceptual sophistication. Unsettling and illuminating, this is feminist scholarship at its best."--Ranajit Guha, founding editor Subaltern Studies "Mani's argument that the terms 'tradition' and 'modernity' are inscribed and reinscribed in the bodies of colonized women has forever changed our understandings of patriarchy, nationalism, and colonialism, and indeed redefined the conditions for 'knowing' with respect to these contexts."--Lisa Lowe, author of Immigration Acts "Lata Mani's brilliant and persuasive analysis of official, native and missionary writings on sati in colonial India makes for a new beginning in contemporary analysis of colonial discourse.This is the book that many have waited for. A landmark publication in several fields at once: modern South Asian history, feminist critiques of colonial discourse, and cultural studies."--Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago

The world is an interdependent whole of which everything is an integral, complexly related, part. Yet current ways of thinking, and being, persistently separate social phenomena and the individual self from the multiple dimensions with which they are interconnected. The Integral Nature of Things examines this revealing paradox and its consequences in a variety of sites: everyday language, labour, advertising, technology, post-structuralist theory, political rhetoric, urban planning, sex, neoliberal globalisation. Mani demonstrates how even though the interrelations between things are obscured by the ruling paradigm, the facts of relationality and indivisibility continually assert themselves. The book interweaves prose with poetry and sociocultural analysis with observational accounts to offer an alternative framework for addressing aspects of the cognitive, cultural, political, and ethical crisis we face today.

Lata Mani

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